GameSalad iPhone Early Access Program now live

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At the beginning of September Gendai Games announced that its GameSalad games creation platform for Mac and the web was going to expand to allow iPhone apps to be created. At the time the company was putting the final touches to the new program, but there was little detail as to how it would work and how much it would cost developers. Yesterday the program was made live and the details of how it functions were released.

For those that don’t know GameSalad Creator offers budding and experienced game developers alike a way to create new games without needing to do any programming. Instead a drag-and-drop system allows you to position and control assets on the screen, building up into either simple or quite complex games. For Mac and web games the software is free and just requires a Mac to run, but for iPhone development there will be a subscription charge.

There are two levels of iPhone developer subscription available: Indie and Pro. The Indie subscription costs $499 a year and gives you access to the basic tools you need to create iPhone games as well as unlimited executables; you can make as many games as you like, but a GameSalad splash screen will appear every time someone boots up your game on their iPhone. The Pro subscription costs significantly more at $1,999 a year, but gets rid of the splash screen, adds “Pro Level Tool Features”, and offers a live support incidents service. Gendai does not want any royalties from your games, the only cost to you is the subscription.

In terms of getting your game on to iPhone you develop using the GameSalad environment on your Mac and when you are ready to send it to Apple for approval you must first send it to Gendai. Its system will then produce an Xcode iPhone executable and e-mail a download link to you. Once downloaded it can be sent to Apple for approval and hopefully be added to the App Store. The only other cost you incur is signing up to the iPhone developer program which is $100 a year.

The first question to ask is whether $499 to develop as many iPhone games as you like without programming is reasonable. The answer is yes, but with a “but” after it. Compared to the other packages out there it is reasonable, especially when you consider something like Torque costs $750, and Unity costs $698.

The “but” comes from the fact that with Unity and Torque your are free to develop what you wish, while with GameSalad the boundaries of development aren’t yet known. It is by far the simplest way to create games for Apple’s iPhone and touch, but what can you achieve with it? Will 20 zombies running around the screen kill the frame rate? Also, there is no information I can find on the difference between the tools and features available in the Pro license which aren’t in the Indie license.

The best course of action if you are interested in this is to first try out the free version of GameSalad. That should get you 90% of the way there in terms of figuring out if it will do what you need. Then just hammer the GameSalad forums asking questions and finding out if you need to shell out $499 or $1,999 to complete your game and get it selling.

GameSalad on iPhone certainly has the potential to be a fantastic iPhone solution, we just need to know how good it is.

There are a some games already released by Gendai using GameSalad on iPhone, below are videos for two of them: